Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 120
About this tablet
A small, pierced clay tag from Adab in southern Iraq, written roughly 2400 BCE. It records amounts of barley measured in gur and barig, set against the names of four men — Ur-ga, Sag-zi, Ur-eš-peš and Ur-dingir — with the god Enlil and the "head granary" named as the institutional context. The closing line declares the whole lot to be a gift made to the sky-god An, so this is temple bookkeeping: grain moved out of a central silo and assigned to named individuals under divine authority. The hole drilled through the tablet shows it was meant to hang, probably tied to a basket, door or container in the storehouse itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain account, measured in gur and barig: an opening total from the granary store, booked under Enlil; then the individual allotments — so much to Ur-ga, so much to Sag-zi, two units to Ur-eš-peš, and a further amount plus two barig to Ur-dingir. The grain comes from the main granary, and the whole disbursement is entered as an offering given to the god An. Several of the opening numerals are chipped away, so the exact totals can no longer be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [n] (gur), 2 barig — granary gur-measure 2. [...] of Enlil 3. [n] (and) 2 — Ur-ga 4. [n] — Sag-zi 5. 2 — Ur-eš-peš 6. [n] (and) 2 barig — Ur-dingir Reverse 7. the head granary — 8. it is that which was given to An.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[n] 2(barig@c) guru7 gur [x? ]en-lil2-la2 [n] 2(asz@c)# ur-ga2 [n] sag-zi 2(asz@c) ur-esz5@t-pesz [n] 2(barig@c)# ur-dingir guru7#-sag-ga2 an#-na-szum2-ma-am3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 120. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252711) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.